I kept waiting for the man to come up. To get it over and done with. Collect my money and go in search of the next client. Time was passing. He didn’t come up. Suduputha came and told me to leave the hotel. I went down the stairs. There was no sign of the man in the chocolate brown shirt and the blue sarong. While I was coming down the steps of the hotel I saw the man in the inner section. Ratne and Podimahattaya were speaking to him. There was a heated argument going on between them. I didn’t stop to find out the reason. For me it was a waste of time. I joined Somi and went off. I had still to earn my money. The night was young.

The next morning I heard that a man was lying dead on the pavement outside the Siripura hotel, the hotel I had visited. The encounter of course had come to nothing. Somi and I walked along till we came to the body. A crowd had gathered. The dead man was lying on the pavement, flies already buzzing about him. He was wearing a chocolate brown shirt and a blue sarong. His clothes were soaked in blood. There were large patches the colour of rust, still damp. I had had nothing to do with him so I felt nothing—no grief, no sense of loss. I hadn’t taken his money either. If I had, I might have felt differently. I may have given some of it for charity, to some poor beggar. To help this unknown man in his next birth. This was his karma. Who knows what evil deeds he had done in the past to meet with such a violent death. He had been stabbed all over his body.

Somi and I went to the police station to give evidence. That was the least we could do for him, for this stranger whom somehow I had met in this vast ocean of samsara. At the police station we were asked many questions. Questions about my life. We had to attend court proceedings too. On the day we were present I recognized some of the men I had seen in the hotel. They were the suspects in the case. The lawyer interrogated me first.

‘How often do you go to the hotel?’

‘Often. For the last three years I have gone regularly there.’

‘How frequently did you go?’

‘About three times a day. With different men.’

‘So, for the last three years you went to the hotel three times daily?’

‘Sometimes I don’t work. I keep away for different reasons but now I have started again to come to the hotel.’

Somi also had to give evidence.

‘Where are you employed?’

‘I have no job.’

‘No other means of subsistence then?’

‘No sir, I can’t get employment. I have to live on what my wife earns.’